One of the things that maybe surprised everyone after the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords is the fact that the United States has not had a confirmed director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for four and a half years. Potential directors nominated by George Bush and Barack Obama alike, both of whom seemed to have the proper credentials for the job, were immediately opposed by the NRA. They objected to unbelievably minor transgressions on the part of the nominees, like revoking gun licenses of sellers who broke the law, and opposing giant .50 caliber bullets. And they were quickly able to find a US Senator to take up their cause and block confirmation. Ian Milhiser writes:

Yet, while the NRA’s objections to (current nominee Andrew) Traver have little grounding in reality, they will likely be sufficient to keep the ATF leaderless. Last month, the Senate returned Traver’s nomination unconfirmed to the President, and the Senate’s broken rules will make it very difficult to move his nomination forward if just one senator objects. Nor is the NRA’s stranglehold on the ATF directorship an isolated incident. As ThinkProgress’ Lee Fang recently reported, corporate lobbyists have created an entire holds-for-sale industry which connects powerful interest groups with senators willing to place a hold on Senate business which could hurt the interest group’s bottom line. Until the Senate’s broken rules are reformed, this kind of influence trading will continue unchecked.

This isn’t even the first time in recent memory that an event of national significance highlighted a lack of leadership at the main agency involved in that event. On Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed in his attempt to light a bomb in his underpants on a Northwest Airlines flight headed for Detroit, there was no agency head of the TSA because Jim DeMint had a hold on the nominee. That didn’t resolve itself for another six months, spanning two additional nominees.

The power of the minority in these fights is simply beyond the pale. And one group of people knowledgeable with legislative rules knew it – the Founding Fathers.

Hamilton and Madison (Washington, too, by the way; I’m not sure about Jay) strongly favored what was then called “proportional representation.“ (Modern P.R., under which legislative seats are distributed roughly in line with aggregate party shares of the vote, hadn’t been invented yet.) Obama-like, they forced themselves to pay what they knew was a corrupt and immoral price in order to get a barely acceptable deal—which deal they sold, Obama-like, as a fine, public-spirited solution.

When it came time to decide who would write the essay defending the two-senators-per-state provision, Madison drew the short straw. In The Federalist No. 62, little Jemmy did not bother to conceal his lack of enthusiasm for the task:

The equality of representation in the Senate is another point, which, being evidently the result of compromise between the opposite pretensions of the large and the small States, does not call for much discussion [...]

The small states made a non-negotiable demand. Madison, Hamilton, and the other grownups realized that the only alternative to giving in was the failure of the Convention and a reversion to the Articles of Confederation, which would be even worse than a government with a screwed-up Senate. So they caved, and now they’re doing their best to stop worrying about the Senate and focus on the good aspects of the proposed new governmental setup, which will probably be less bad (“the lesser evil”) than the status quo.

We’re 224 years out from that decision, and the malapportionment of the Senate have only grown worse, with Wyoming having equal representation in the body as California despite have 67 times as few residents. But the malapportionment magnifies even more when you give a minority veto powers, even a minority of one in many cases.

Making holds transparent will not do. There has to be an easier way to set up the executive branch than to force thousands of prospective hires through a bottleneck in the Senate, where just one enterprising Senator can deny the appointment for any reason whatsoever. The rules changes in the Udall/Harkin/Merkley consensus document would reduce post-cloture time on nominees from 30 hours to 2, substantially reducing the pain of playing out a cloture vote on a nominee. I’d prefer an up or down vote, but I’d prefer virtually anything to the utterly broken system we have now.

Help spread the wealth.To keep the corporate lobbyists holds for sale business always a start up business.Force the lobbyists to buy new senators after every election.Vote out every incumbent senitor every election.

Industry capture is one of them. As a standalone agency it’s funding has always been in jeopardy. But to understand the issue you have to go back to the times in the 80′s and 90′s and 2003 when there was actual legislation to abolish the ATF and fold its authority into the Secret Service or FBI. Everything else you hear is just grandstanding. Here’s what happened when Congress proposed to abolish the ATF:

4) Secret Service opposed (didn’t want to absorb ATF agents)
5) FBI has not expressed opinion since 2003 when ATF reorganized under DOJ

Gun control advocates tend to reflexively oppose abolishing the ATF for fear that regulation will be weakened in the process, but in truth ATF is not respected by other law enforcement agencies and there have been numerous jurisdictional problems. The quality of their training has been questioned as well, particularly after Waco and Ruby Ridge.

The ATF is a whipping boy on the right so there is a chance for the left to move in with a reorganization plan that would get rid of the ATF, save money, and at the same time have better gun laws.

Well, as far as individual, transparent Senate holds go – it’s my understanding that they are a courtesy granted by the Senate majority leader and not even part of the rules of the Senate. So Harry Reid can (and in certain cases has) ignore them at will. Reid could eliminate that particular stranglehold of the minority by refusing to uphold Senatorial ‘tradition.’ But that would require ….s.

I’m sure they’ll get to confirming an ATF director right after they get someone confirmed to head up the Office of Legal Counsel. They haven’t had one of those since Jack Goldsmith resigned on June 30, 2004.

I suspect the BATFE of ongoing incompetence and lack of focus, based on their performance in the 1990s (the aforementioned Ruby Ridge and Waco) and on their utterly baseless attack on the high powered model rocketry hobby. I’d like to see a director who promised not go there again.

A couple of other reasons to support folding the BATFE into other agencies:

1) What on earth does the regulation of alcohol and tobacco (somewhat related to each other) have to do with the regulation of firearms and explosives? I think this weird smashing together of regulatory domains is destined to produce brain-dead enforcement.

2)The aforementioned complete lack of respect on the part of very nearly everyone for the BATFE.

Since this thread is slow, I’ll tell the (irrelevant but fun) story about my almost interaction with ATF. Date was 4/81. I was about 7 months pregnant. We were returning from a vacation in Mexico. I was carrying an antique rifle that we had bought in Mexico to put in the gun rack in the historic house we had bought a year & a third earlier. It was wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, looking for all the world like a rifle wrapped in brown paper tied with string. Customs agents in NOLA, where we reentered U.S., told us we’d have to do all the paper worky thingy with ATF to bring it into the country. My late husband ripped the paper off the end of the barrel & told the customs agent to inspect it, wrt to the fact that it hadn’t been fired in decades, and therefore should be regarded as an antique, not a firearm. The agent agreed & let us thru with no further ado.

“…I’d prefer virtually anything to the absolutely broken system we have now.”

Be careful what you wish for Brother David, the fixing of the system will not happen WITH the current elected executive and congress. A real political fix is specifically partisan will take 2 years if it is to happen at all. The only way the idea of representative government is rescucitated and progress toward fullfillment of that idea restarted is to take the leadership of the Democratic Party away from the executive and retake the House of Representatives with the same 50 state strategy that was successful from 2005-06 and enabled Obama to capture the White House in ’08.

Getting this accomplished is a race against the clock with Obama poised to triangulate Democrats right out of the Democratic Party with a grand “bi-partisan” bagain with the fascist Republicans. Our energies should be targeted at the grassroots in the hollowed out shell of the local party and the existing elected progressives at the state level. Howard Dean did it in 2005 and once he got the DNC it only took ‘im 1 year to organize the party in every state and he could do it again but the battle must be planned coordinated and engaged in the next 6 months.

Obama won another rhetorical battle and soothed the people’s anger and fear last night but the political space he’s gained is gunna be used by his new cheif of staff and the banksters to re-legitimize the Republican Party and institutionalize divided government…unless we beat ‘im to the punch and take our party back.

KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION AND FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T SHOOT THE FRIENDLIES!!

Unfortunately I can’t find a good summary of the nearly decade long legal fight, so I’ll do my best to summarize it. I was mostly an interested bystander for this, not a direct participant. I also haven’t been active in the hobby for years, for various reasons, but I think it’s important that it remains viable.

High power rocketry (HPR) is an out-growth of model rocketry, and is distinguished by larger, more powerful, and more sophisticated rockets. As a result, there’s substantial (and generally appropriate) regulatory oversight of launches by local fire marshals and the FAA. Since the mid-90s, it has even begun to bleed into the low end of the aerospace business. It has an exemplary safety record; in forty years or so the hobby has been around (accounts vary), there have been no injuries requiring hospitalization directly connected to the operation of a high powered rocket when using commercially manufactured motors. It turns out that you can do things that are naturally somewhat risky if you go out to the far boonies and stand way back. Further, none of them has ever been used in the commission of a crime of violence in the US.

Sometime in the late 90s, the ATF decided to insert its oar by re-classifying the solid rocket motors (not all HPRs use solid motors; some use hybrid motors, a development driven in part by this fight) used in most HPR birds as explosives. This was and is inappropriate because they do not function by explosion, as required by the authorizing statute; they function by burning. The Tripoli Rocket Association (TRA), the primary organizational arm of the HPR hobby in the US, sued to overturn the regulation in 2000.

In order to justify its overstepping of its statutory authority after the fact, the ATF developed the hare-brained theory that HPR motors could be used to build surface to air missiles. This is absurd; HPR motors lack the reliability or repeatability required to build a missile capable of hitting an aircraft in flight. In service of this theory, they strong-armed one of the primary suppliers of HPR motors into selling them a pile. They set up to fire their rockets out of a van at an Air Force Base. They stored all of their unfired motors in the same van. I should hope anyone with two functioning brain cells realizes how abominably stupid that is; it’s a violation of a good half of the tenets of the TRA safety code. The result was utterly predictable. They got away with the first shot… but something went wrong with the second and set the van and its contents on fire. The end result was a raging fire and a number of completely uncontrolled rocket motors flying all over the place. The (rental) van was completely destroyed. I’ve seen the video, and it was good for plenty of schadenfreude.

John Walker, 50, of Alexandria, is accused of setting up an operation to illegally convert semiautomatic weapons into fully automatic weapons, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Such weapons frequently fall into the hands of criminals, giving them far more firepower than the police, agents said.
An undercover ATF agent purchased an AK-47 in the parking lot of a popular family restaurant. It had been altered to fire dozens of bullets with a single press of the trigger…

In 1968, the US government passed the 1968 Gun Control Act prohibiting the importation of military weapons. Anticipating the ban before it went into effect, Interarms went on a global buying spree that enabled Cummings to keep his US operations thriving for many years. When the ban finally came into effect, Cummings had some 700,000 small arms stored in his warehouses in Alexandria, Virginia.